The world of multi-room sound systems just got louder; backed by Bernard Arnault and boasting stunning performance in a tiny package, meet the Devialet Phantom

The rush by the audio industry to join the growing market for wireless multi-room sound systems has, in all likelihood, not escaped your notice, with Sonos and Naim leading the charge for multi-room sound systems. And now Devialet has entered the fray. Back in 2010, the company created the beautiful, multi award-winning, £12,000 D-Premier amplifier.

This innovation managed to combine a low-power, high-quality Class A amplifier with a powerful Class D counterpart. It boasted analogue-digital hybrid amplification technology, or “ADH”, where an analog amplifier set the output voltage while digital amplifiers provided most of the current. This meant the listener got the best of both worlds; the power and compact of digital with the quality and emotion of analog.

With this considerable technical clout –combined with investment by entrepreneurs including Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH – Devialet brings us the Phantom. It is a wireless multi-room system with superlative, futuristic design and jaw-dropping performance. The Phantom boasts 750 watts while the Silver Phantom hits 3,000 watts.

According to Quentin Sannié, CEO of Devialet, the company has managed to condense the ADH tech into a chipset, allowing it to shoehorn this stunning performance into a speaker just 25cm wide. This also pleasingly brings the price point down. The Phantom will cost £1,390, while the Silver Phantom will be £1,690.

The wonderful clarity of the sound is the Phantom’s party trick. With an arresting bandwidth of 16Hz to 25kHz, crisp high tones are combined with Mariana Trench deep bass notes that are not manipulated through any boost functions. What you are experiencing is the actual bass on tracks, even at extremely low volume, without any need for the tweaking and cheating you experience from other wireless speakers.

At our demonstration, organ music with bass notes around 60 and 83hz showed how admirably the design copes with these frequencies. What’s more, the supremely balanced 11kg aluminium alloy core Phantom remained stock-still, evidenced by a smartphone balanced on its top.

In short, I almost could not believe the sound was coming from this small speaker. Then Sannié turned on yet another Phantom, stereo-linking them, and at that juncture I started to contemplate how I might trade in my existing wireless system for one of these marvels.

And this is the point: yes, you can wirelessly link up to 24 Phantoms over Wi-Fi using Devialet’s Dialog router for the ultimate party setup, yet due to the prodigious power and lack of need for a sub-woofer (because of the Phantom’s inherent bass supremacy) you only require one or two speakers for quality house-trembling sound. Add up how much you might spend on a Sonos system with a few speakers and a sub and one very quickly enters Phantom price territory.

There are a couple of very small minus points. Sannié says they were looking to recreate the sophistication of a £50,000 system in the £1.5k Phantom, and this is perhaps an over-ambitious goal. The lack of a mute button (or any button) will mean running for your phone to turn it down if you get a call – not that you’d actually hear your phone over the system. Also, the “omni-directional sound” (allowing placement of the speaker in any part of a room) is not entirely “omni”. You certainly cannot stand directly behind the speaker and get the same quality of reproduction as if you were standing in front or to the side.

These, as I say, are minor quibbles. This speaker is the best in its class to date, and not surprising when you note that the Phantom has been more than two years in development and that Devialet’s 40 engineers on the project notched up some 77 patents on its new baby. Even the dedicated Branch speaker stands are innovative allowing a docked Phantom to draw power from them while also acting as heat sinks.

There is much more to say – the system upgrades automatically so you need not worry about checking for new software; gesture control that allows you to alter volume and skip tracks by waving a hand over the casing is more than likely coming in one such update. But we’d suggest heading down to Harrods from 1 February, where the Phantom is being exclusively sold for the first six months, to experience it for yourself. Because it is an experience. You might not believe your ears.